


I'm the fuel and she's the spark

by openhearts



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith
Genre: 5 Times, F/M, non-kisses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-10-14 09:29:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20598530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openhearts/pseuds/openhearts
Summary: Five times Strike and Robin don't kiss.Plus one.





	I'm the fuel and she's the spark

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! Guess who watched the series and then read all four books in the span of like two weeks??
> 
> This is not beta'd or brit-picked, if anyone is willing to look over any future bits I might get into please to message me!
> 
> Title from Wildfire by Seafret

1

The Land Rover is not ideal for overnight surveillance on a winter's night in London, but then neither are any of the barren warehouses surrounding the one they’re surveilling, nor the open frigid air. Strike had briefly suggested they layer up and conceal their binoculars and cameras with sleeping bags on the street, pretending to be sleeping rough. He hadn't finished his sentence in difference to the thing Robin's face did.

The Land Rover, as it turns out, is more comfortable, but also more conspicuous, given that the transients in residence across the street from where they’re parked are apparently of no interest to the officers in the panda car pulled up to a stop behind them.

“Shit they’re coming.”

Robin spares Strike a glance before decisively swinging a leg over the console between the front seats and slinging herself onto Strike’s lap. He hmpfs at the surprise of her weight and frantically juggles the flask of coffee into the cup holder while she settles over him, bracing her knees into the smidgeons of space on either side of him.

“Your leg alright?” she asks lowly, shifting her weight carefully over his thighs. Her fingers are already picking open a button on her blouse. 

Strike swallows audibly before remembering to nod, a, “yeah,” falling out with his breath. 

“Just . . . go with it,” she adds self-consciously. 

Her eyes catch on his briefly and he sees, even in the dark of the car, how ruddy her cheeks have gone.

“Yeah,” Strike repeats, catching up to the moment, going for reassuring. 

Robin yanks the tie out of her hair so that it billows around her shoulders and her face, downturned to his. The beam of light from a torch swings across the windscreen. Their hands collide at his collar and confuse together for a moment before he moves and Robin undoes two buttons. Recklessly he plunges his hands into her loosed hair instead, raking through as he would- well. As he would. 

It already seems the temperature in the Land Rover has increased by ten degrees with their sudden proximity; Strike feels a sweat break out across the back of his neck.

The copper knocks on the window finally. Robin swipes her palm across her lips and then Strikes, smudging the traces of her lipstick over both their mouths, and, the both of them convincingly mussed, he reaches to wind down the window.

-

2

Here they are again, this time snuck away from a company cocktail party and planting listening devices in as many offices as they can before they’re discovered. Voices sound in the hallway, sharp and unamused - not those of partygoers looking for a quiet darkened corner. There’s no exit but the way they came, back into the hallway where the disembodied voices travel quickly closer to the door Strike had left just ajar.

Shit.

There’s a moment’s pause, their gazes frantically stuck on each other.

"Forgive me," Strike mutters, his eyes wide. 

He takes Robin by the waist and lifts her easily to the desk. Robin scrambles back, and a fleeting dread washes over Strike in the second before she slings an arm around the back of his neck and parts her knees, drawing him with her as she scoots herself more securely onto the desk. Their joint momentum sets him off balance, leaning her deeply back and dragging him with her all the way. 

The voices in the hall draw nearer.

Their noses bump together. He can pick out individual microscopic flecks of glitter in her eye makeup. Robin’s fingertips dig into his shoulder.

Strike's hands, of their own joint accord, travel a bit, one traitorous thumb skidding along the underside of Robin's left breast in a mindless caress. Belatedly, for he's already jerked his hand clear back to her hip, she gasps and he breathes out "fuck," apologetically. Robin shakes her head, a gesture whose meaning Strike can't identify but considers in the ensuing silence could have been a further objection to his touch, a dismissal of his apology as unneeded, or perhaps a directive to be quiet, the better for her to hear some noise he's not noticed.

Silence, he realizes belatedly. 

It's silent but for their breaths, both inside the room and the corridor beyond. Whoever had been making their noisy approach has either returned the way they came or continued on, unaware of the couple beyond the frosted glass walls of the darkened office.

Unless, the thought occurs to both Robin and Strike simultaneously as they glance back at each other, they're waiting outside, listening. His eyes fall to Robin's parted lips. She, for her part, has her gaze locked somewhere near Strike's chin. Their pause stretches, coloring with realization of their position - entwined as they are, her foot still curled around the back of his right knee.

"Cormoran?" Robin whispers. 

Prompting, prompting him to what? Disengage and allow her down from the desk? Close their distance and kiss her finally? Both, it turns out.

Robin pats his shoulder, shifting on the desk and giving him a clear yet gentle signal to let her go. As she slides past him to her feet again though, she tips her head down to kiss her own brow against his lips, slow and purposefully, for a long beat.

“Robin-”

She turns her eyes up to his, half a smile curled into the corner of her lips. His chin tips down, reaching, and the voices in the hallway reappear, suddenly, damnedly.

-

3

The water doesn’t scald his hands this time.

The last time Strike had dragged a woman out of a bathtub his hands had smarted for days after he’d found her murdered. This time the water is icy cold - in fact there are still ice cubes floating in it above Robin’s motionless submerged body. 

How much of him will ache, and for how long, if- 

She can’t have been there too long, if the ice is still in such large chunks. Her nose is still just barely bobbing above the surface of the water as it overflows the tub. His knees both scream when they slam into the side of the tub; he’s slid across the slick puddled tile floor, landing hard, half-submerging himself to scoop his arms beneath Robin’s body - _Robin_, still herself, still here, still- and heave her out.

She’s cold. Of course she’s cold, she’d been tied up and tossed in a tub of freezing water, it doesn’t mean-

He rips at the tape that covers her mouth and finds her lips blue beneath.

“Robin, _Robin!_”

Maybe he’s been shouting it this whole time.

He stops only to give her up from his arms and lay her down flat on her back on the cold wet tile, ear to her chest. His frantic thoughts silence, everything stops down to his own heartbeat so he can listen for hers.

It’s there, faint, a laboured glug.

She is.

He curses his smoker’s lungs, actually thinks an apology to her in advance as he gasps in a deep breath. He plugs her nose, holds her chin tilted up, and seals his mouth over hers to push his breath into her lungs.

-

4

A chorus of cheers rings out above the din.

Strike’s eyes roll upward, already knowing what he’ll see. Naturally there’s mistletoe. Over the drinks table, because Ilsa is, beneath her erudite lawerly exterior, an opportunistic and ruthless bastard.

"But not on the mouth!" bellows the woman herself.

This rule, she’d announced with a merry demonic glint in her eye at the outset of the party. Everyone, yes, everyone who was caught beneath the mistletoe in couples would kiss, but not on the mouth. A kindness for the more retiring of their guests, and a trap. Being a lawyer, Ilsa understands in explicit detail the power of suggestion, of the thing not said.

So you see they’re not perverts, she and Nick, no, not at all. Whatever could you lot be thinking? 

Robin, at Strike’s side, who had been festively pink-cheeked, is now beet red and tittering nervously.

Strike acts quickly, decisively.

He brushes Robin’s long gold locks away from her warm neck, just barely damp with sweat from the closeness and warmth of the overstuffed house, the champagne, the embarrassment. Action decided, he doesn't pause, but he does realize and takes it with all the grace of a man sucker punched in the gut that Robin doesn't flinch, doesn't even shy away at the suddenness of his touch.

Her neck revealed, he kisses the stretch of her pale skin.

Perhaps for a second or two longer than the bare minimum, but it’s because he knows down to his bones that Ilsa is not above calling for a repeat if she deems the first effort lacks conviction.   
Strike doesn't actually lick Robin’s neck, but the suggestion is there in both of their closed eyes and parted lips.

The deed done, a hellaciously raucous series of whoops rises from the room, covering Strike's whispered, "alright?" from all but Robin's own ears.

She shivers, as if this is the sensuous moment, eyes fluttering, and gives a tiny nodding dip of her chin in answer. Strike thunks his forehead to her shoulder and blows out a sigh of incredulity, flapping his lips with it. Robin guffaws once, in spite of herself, and shrugs him off only to catch his eye and let him see her.

Flushed, tipsy, luminescent in the midst of the riotous brightness of the room around them.

-

5

Their working lunch at the Tottenham has turned long and dawdling, blurring along into a weekend that would hold more hours of work for them both, so any pressure to leave and get on with leisure plans is nearly non-existent. Their comfortable silences stretch - the odd, slurred, case-related non-sequitur excepted. By degrees and hours they give up any pretext of work along with the sun dipping lower and painting gold, orange, and cool blue light in turn through the windows.

When eventually they leave the sky is fully black. They’re both supremely sloshed, leaning heavily into each other's sides and Strike has just tripped off the curb - mercifully landing on his right foot first with its properly shock-absorbing flesh and bone - when Robin actually barks, "Oi!"

She tugs him by the sleeve of his overcoat - it's too warm for the thing but he hadn’t realized to leave it off until the moment. Strike swings around at her insistent tug, free arm and false leg each swinging out a bit in a lackadaisical arc with Robin as the centerpoint of his revolution. As he reels around she catches his other shoulder and, her still standing on the curb in the moderately heeled boots she favors, her chin is level with his nose, his face upturned to hers. 

He won't know, the next when day when he’s sobered up, or still the day after that, whether she misses in aiming for his lips or meant to kiss his cheek. A sloppy mash of her mouth to the soft stubbled hollow below his cheekbone. She lingers, nose nuzzling, and he does more than forebear it, in fact hears a kind of rumble of satisfaction from somewhere within his ribs.

She parts with an audible smack, sways into him again until she stumbles down from the curb as well and they totter away, she nudging beneath his arm in a show of support that upholds them both as they make their way home to Denmark Street.

Home.

Home for him. But when they reach it and stand toe to toe at the threshold of the outer entrance, Strike sways enough that his forehead collides with hers painfully. She snorts.

"You absolutely. Cannot go home alone in this state," he intones.

"Oh dear,” Robin sighs. “‘m’I sleeping on the fart sofa?"

His eyes are crossed trying to look at her but it’s enough feeling her smooth skin against his where their foreheads touch, smelling the sharp tang of wine on her breath, hearing her sleepy amused voice without a trace of foreboding at the idea of sleeping a floor below him instead of anywhere else.

"You are, darling."

The words unfurl from his lips like tentacles from some tender monster within him.

Robin nods, the motion jostling both their heads until Strike, with effort, leans away and digs out his keys.

As they begin to traverse the clanging metal staircase, hand in hand, which he only realizes as he grips the stair rail with his other, he thinks he hears her pronounce with great care,

"You're very good to me. Cr-m'ran Strike."

It's the end of his memory of the evening, her soft voice, muffled by her own fingers brushing her lips.

-

+1

The summer’s clung longer than usual, enough that Strike gives some consideration to an iced coffee from a shop than hot tea to start the blazing bright morning. He fills and turns on the kettle eventually anyway and sits himself down in Robin’s chair while it heats. He slouches down with his head pillowed at the top of the backrest and arranges his leg with less pressure on the prosthesis.

His thoughts flit around restlessly - he tries to make a mental list of which tasks they’ll divide and handle for the day but it’s a fruitless exercise. Robin arrives then anyway, interrupting his sloshy thoughts that have no reason to be; he’s stone sober.

“Morning,” she greets him in her usual bright way, and he returns it. 

He means to say more but just watches as she hangs up her handbag and crosses to the kettle which must have beeped that it was ready without him noticing. There’s more, something she’s saying, things his fuzzed out brain won’t retain. He squints into the sunlight pouring in the windows until she blocks it, standing in front of him.

“Sorry?” he asks, blinking alert.

Robin's holding out a mug of tea, her smile tinged with concern alongside teasing suspicion.

“Alright in there?”

Alright? No, not all.

Strike sits up from his slouch, both hands reaching, one to wrap around the back of hers and the other to gently dislodge the mug from it.

He sets it rather blindly on the desk beside him. Her brows quirk, her smile dropping a bit.

His eyes don’t leave hers in the beat before he tugs, firmly, on her hand until she’s leant over him, almost stumbling if not for each of their free hands - hers at his shoulder and his on her waist.

Her widened eyes, the sweet “oh” of her mouth, are the last things he sees as he closes the space between them, finally.

-


End file.
